"'Clara, my own dear love,' said Mr Grindlejerkin after a pause, 'can you tell me what we are to have for supper?'
"'La! Mr Grindlejerkin,' replied the lady, 'how should I know? Sassengers and pettitoes, I suppose. It's very odd,' continued she, addressing Silas--'it's very odd, but Mr Grindlejerkin always _does_ ask me what he is to have for supper!'
"Silas didn't think it was odd at all, for the same idea had just been floating through his mind; but as he did not think it would be right to say so, he merely smiled, whereupon Mrs Grindlejerkin, who was a good-natured body in the main, smiled too, and Mr Grindlejerkin began to smile, but checked himself, and didn't, because it might have been thought that he was letting down his dignity. So he contented himself with ringing the bell, and directed the servant-girl who answered it, rather ferociously, to bring him a tumbler of rum-and-water.
"'Ha! Bingo, my buck, how are you?' cried the Master of the Ring to the principal clown, who now entered the apartment, and who, being a personage of much consideration and importance in the theatrical circles, might be addressed with any kind of familiarity without a compromise of official reserve. 'How are ye, Bingo? Well and herty, eh? Won't you take a drop of summat?'
"'I will,' replied the clown in a melancholy voice, well corresponding to his features, which, when the paint was washed off, were haggard and malagugrious in the extreme. 'I will; but I am not well. Spasms in the heart, kidneys, merry-thought, and liver. A silent sorrow here. Age brings care. I thank you. Stop. I like it stiff.'
"'That's my rum 'un!' said Mr Grindlejerkin. 'Drown dull care in Jamaikey. But here is the Signora Estrella. Madame, you are most welcome!'
"Silas felt the blood rise to his temples. And so at last he could meet her, the lady of his heart, the bright star of his boyish existence, not in the feverish whirl of the arena, beneath the glare of gas, surrounded by clouds of sawdust and the gazing eyes of thousands, but in the calm sanctuary of private life, where, at least if he could find the courage, he might pour forth the incense of his soul, and tell her how madly, how desolatingly he had begun to love her--no, not begun, for it seemed to him as if he had loved her long before he ever saw her: as if the love of her were something implanted in his bosom before yet he knew what it was to undergo the agonies of teething; long before, like a roasting oyster, he lay in his silken cradle, and squared with tiny and ineffectual fists at the approaching phantoms of time, existence, and futurity. It seemed to him as though the doll, with which, when a very little child, he had played, had just the same dark lustrous eyes, with something bead-like and mysterious in their expression, which lent such an inexpressible fascination to the countenance of the beautiful Canterini. That doll! he had fondled it a thousand times in his baby arms: had called it his duck, his dolly, his wifikin, and numerous other terms of childish prattle and endearment: had grown jealous of it, because, when his little brother kissed it, it did not cry out or show any symptoms of anger, and so, in a mad moment of rage and remorse, he had struck the waxen features against a mantelpiece, and shivered them into innumerable fragments. What would he not have given at that moment to have recalled the doll! But it could not be. The fragments had been long, long ago swept into the dust-hole of oblivion, and though they might afterwards have been carried out and scattered over the fresh green fields, where there are trees, and cows, and little singing-birds, and flowers, they could not be--oh no, never--reunited! But the lady, the Signora! no rude hand had marred the wax of that countenance; for though very, very pale, there still lingered beneath her eyes a touch of the enchanting carmine.